monkeypox

Should Americans, and the rest of the world, worry about the current outbreak of Monkeypox? It doesn’t look like it will cause the same level of morbidity and mortality that COVID has caused, but it does have the potential to infect a lot of people.

It’s worth knowing the history of this disease. As reported in the Smithsonian magazine, “Since it was first identified in a colony of monkeys in Copenhagen in 1958, monkeypox has been largely overlooked by the Western world. An infectious poxvirus that causes fever, chills and rashes, the disease is endemic, or consistently regionally present, in ten African countries. Until recently, however, it was rarely found in Europe and the Americas—a trend that has, historically, led Western public health officials to disregard its spread elsewhere.”